The Mandela Month Mix

By Sanele Mkhize, Creative Director at Soundela

This is a slightly different thing to be putting on the Soundela site because this isn't a Soundela project.

There was no client brief, no one asked me to make it, and it wasn't really made with the intention of releasing it. It was just something I wanted to try.

The mix itself is essentially a DJ mix with bits of Mandela's speeches used throughout, mostly around the transitions. The music came first, and I then went through the speeches looking for moments that could work with what was already in the mix.

It was also interesting that I'd just moved my studio into Transwerke at Constitution Hill around the same time. I wonder whether being in a place with so much history had anything to do with why I was drawn to doing this 😂 , or if I'm just making a connection after the fact.

Its from all the Mandela Day stuff going around and working on and it reminded me of an Osunlade mix called Malcolm X Speaks (I played that mix a lot). He used snippets of Malcolm X throughout the mix and I remember thinking, it would be cool to do something like this with Mandela.

So I tried it.

The music came first. I didn't want to make a Mandela speech mix and then put music underneath it. I wanted the mix to work as a mix, and then find places where the voice could sit.

The recordings came from very different moments in Mandela's life: His Rivonia Trial statement in 1964, his speech following his release from Victor Verster Prison in 1990, his 1994 presidential inauguration, and the signing of the Constitution in 1996.

The speeches are obviously long, so a lot of it was listening through them, finding moments that felt important, cutting them down and seeing if they still made sense once they were short enough to fit into the music.

Some of the older recordings are quite thin and noisy, while the later ones are much clearer. I didn't really try to make them all sound the same. A bit of delay helped with some of the gaps and noise and, strangely, made the different recordings feel a little more connected.

The Mzwakhe Mbuli section was one of those little things that just felt right. His praises before Mandela's inauguration have their own rhythm, so I let the voice move from left to right and back again. There wasn't really a big reason for it. It just worked with what he was doing.

I put a copy of the mix on a stick and listened to it on the way home.

I thought I'd go back and fix a few things properly later.

I never did.

That's probably the hardest part of being an audio person. You know exactly what you'd change. You can hear the better version in your head.

The version I had was bounced on the first night for the car, so the mixdown and quality weren't really where I'd want them for a final release. I kept thinking I'd redo it when I had time.

Then, after a conversation with a friend about how DJs often just put their mixes out, I thought maybe I should stop waiting for the perfect version.

So I'm putting it out as it is.

It's not a Soundela project. But I suppose it does belong here in a different way. The people behind Soundela spend a lot of time listening to music, radio, voices and culture, and those things inevitably find their way into how we think about sound.

Sometimes it's for a client.

Sometimes it's just because you wondered what would happen if you tried something.

This was one of those.

Listen to the mix.